Joseph Watson

Posts by Joseph Watson

Who would guess that an artist born and bred on a Vermont farm would create some of the most iconic postcards of New York City? Rachael Robinson Elmer’s ground-breaking “Art-Lovers New York” postcard series is currently on exhibit at the Middlebury College Davis Family Library, on the upper level, through April 17th, 2015. The exhibition, on loan from Rokeby Museum and sponsored by Middlebury College Special Collections and Archives, presents all twelve cards, as well as biographical information, historical context, and the three postcards of London that originally inspired Rachael.

Rachael Robinson Elmer changed the aesthetic of American postcards. She pioneered the fine art city view card when her Impressionist paintings of popular scenes in her beloved New York City were produced as postcards by P. F. Volland in 1914. Her “Art Lover’s New York” cards were immediately copied by dozens of artists in New York and elsewhere.

Rachael Robinson Elmer was born at Rokeby to artist parents Rowland Evans and Anna Stevens Robinson in 1878. Her art education began before she had even started school and continued with a young people’s summer art program in New York City and later, at the Art Students League. She moved to New York as a young woman and commenced a successful career as a graphic artist. Rachael married businessman Robert Elmer in 1911 and died prematurely in February 1919 in the Spanish flu epidemic.

The Middlebury College Special Collections and Archives holds the extensive historical correspondence collection of the Robinson Family on long-term loan from Rokeby Museum. The books of Rachael’s father, Rowland E. Robinson, are part of the Abernethy Collection of American Literature and the Flander’s Ballad Collection. See our previous blog post, Reading Rowland Out Loud, for more on that.

Special Collections has enjoyed a busy start to 2014 with several J-term classes visiting this week to use our collections for coursework. Prof. Peter Lourie’s class Adventure Writing and Digital Story Telling came to see 17th to early 20th century examples of travel and adventure writing, as well as to view photos from the College Archives of students engaging in their own adventures over the years.

And below see some photos from Prof. Kacy McKinney’s class Space and Place in the Graphic Novel. Students learned about the history of illustrations in books, viewing everything from a 1484 illuminated Latin text, to recently published graphic novels.

Special Collections has enjoyed a busy start to 2014 with several J-term classes visiting this week to use our collections for coursework. Here’s a group from Prof. Kacy McKinney’s class Space and Place in the Graphic Novel. Students learned about the history of illustrations in books, viewing everything from a 1484 illuminated Latin text, to recently published graphic novels.

Instead of holding book sales to get rid of unwanted books, we’re now sending withdrawn books to Better World Books, a company that turns them into money for the good of humanity.

In recent years, the quality of our local book sales has been declining because we are receiving fewer large gifts of books than in the past. When we accepted large gifts in the past, we often sorted through them and added appropriate books, which was sometimes a small percentage of the total gift, and put the rest of the books into the book sale. Our book sales had interesting duplicate copies and fun books that wouldn’t be appropriate for an academic library. Without that influx of gift books, the local books sales just consist of withdrawn academic books that relatively few people are interested in purchasing. After all, the reason those books are being withdrawn from the library collection is because nobody is using them, so it’s not surprising that hundreds of those books were left over at the end of the last sale. (We couldn’t even give them away for free.)

Rather than sending them directly to recycling, we found the Better World Books library program. We ship our withdrawn books to them at no cost to us, they market them to a world-wide audience, and when they sell them, a percentage of the profit comes to us and a percentage goes to the BWB Literacy Partners. It’s a very efficient way to dispose of our withdrawn books while benefiting both Middlebury and the world beyond.

If we ever have a quantity of books that we think will be of interest to our local community, we’ll probably put them in a sale, but for now, no book sales are scheduled for the foreseeable future.

Sandy Stott of the Thoreau Farm recently visited Special Collections at Davis Family Library to see Henry David Thoreau’s personal copy of Walden with his notes in the margins. Stott wrote about his visit in this very nice blog post– http://thoreaufarm.org/2013/07/holding-walden/

Thoreau’s personal copy of Walden is invaluable and one of Middlebury College’s most significant holdings. Special Collections plans to digitize the pages with Thoreau’s marginalia so that this unique content can be shared widely on the web. In order to preserve the hard copy safely for future generations, access to it is strictly limited and an advance appointment is necessary. Please see the Special Collections page for more information.

I recently took the class “The Printed Book in the West to 1800″ at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. Several colleagues had attended classes there and told me they were excellent, and it did indeed turn out to be a fantastic experience. Classes were held Mon.-Fri., 8:30 to five, four sessions each day, with one session each day being hands-on in UVA’s Special Collections. There were only twelve people in the class. My teacher was Martin Antonetti, the Special Collections Librarian at Smith College. Martin is an excellent lecturer and has an amazing depth of knowledge of the history of the book, and world history in general.

Despite the title of the class, we actually began our week with a survey of the book in the manuscript era. Just as the printed era is now overlapping with the digital era, the manuscript era overlapped with the era of the printed book for about two hundred years. Early printed books were often trying to imitate manuscript books. We explored the context of manuscript production, the role of the church and the rise of humanism, and the role of literacy or lack thereof. We learned a lot about the invention of paper, paper manufacturing, and developments in metallurgy that made the invention of the printing press possible.

Of course we learned a lot about Johannes Gutenberg and his invention of the printing press in 1450. We studied various forms of early fonts, explored their origin and politics, and learned how they can sometimes be used to identify the date and location of the publication of a book. We learned about the way an early print shop operated, and explored the influence of the church and the impact of the guild system on the restriction or advancement of printing and publishing. Each of us got to operate a reproduction of a 16th century hand press and print a leaf that we then folded into a signature. (The press looked exactly like the one pictured above.)

We studied early bindings, styles of sewing, and learned about the many kinds of animal hide, cloth, and paper that were used to cover cases. A book conservator from NEDCC demonstrated book binding. We also examined many different styles of bindings and binding decoration. We learned about the relationship between text and pictures, the history of illustrations, and the various methods of producing images for books. Antonetti also covered the history of libraries and book collecting.

Throughout the week we examined materials from UVA’s Special Collections library seeing everything from a stunningly beautiful 14th c. illuminated choir book to18th century printed books bound in amazing Grolier style bindings. I also attended an evening lecture “Bibliography in the Digital Age”, by Stephen Karian, (some of our catalogers would have enjoyed this a lot, I only somewhat did) and a second forum “Thinking Inside the Box: Protective Enclosures for Your Collections” by Kara McClurken, Head of Preservation Services at UVA. (I tried to connect with Kara for a tour of their work units, but schedules didn’t allow it… hopefully another time.)

So why does it make sense for me to study early printed books now, at the dawn of the digital age? The short answer is, I’m now going to be much more involved in the preservation of our Special Collections and we have many rare and valuable items to care for. I can now tell the difference between hand laid and machine manufactured paper. I can tell if an illustration was printed from a wood block or from a plate, and whether that plate was etched or engraved. I can evaluate whether a book’s case is the same age as the text block or newer. I understand how paper and books were produced… etc. Because I have a much deeper understanding of how books were made during the first part of the print era, I am better equipped to make conservation treatment decisions about those materials.

The book is changing a great deal as we transition from the print to the digital era. With e-readers of one model or another becoming more and more ubiquitous, most of us are changing our attitude toward our printed collections. We’re now thinking of the vast majority our printed books as ephemeral, when just over a decade ago we thought of them as permanent. As attitudes concerning typical books evolve and they become less valued, I believe our Special Collections, those books whose physical characteristics make them unique, rare, beautiful, or particularly interesting, will become more and more valued. That’s why I’m glad I’ve learned more about those materials so I can more readily facilitate the preservation of them.